Bracing for a bruising budget battle
Before leaving town for a weeklong recess, the Senate approved a $2.36 trillion budget that pares back some of the president's spending and slows his tax cuts. The 51-to-45 vote kept intact much of the president's proposals on defense and tightened domestic spending. But it ignores his call for the tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 to be made permanent.
In his Capitol Hill office on the third floor of the Cannon Building, Nussle has a bust of Abraham Lincoln on a side table; there's a reproduction of Grant Wood's American Gothic on the wall above it. Wood was born in a little town in Jones County in Nussle's eastern Iowa district. And in Nussle's approach to the deficit, there is something of the stoic implacability universally associated with that famous painting.
"We have to start that long journey with a first step," he said in unveiling his budget. Nussle has no illusions about what lies ahead, or how intimately interested everyone is in his budget. Lawmakers, with their own pet projects in mind, do not defer to the budget chairman in the same way they do to other chairmen. "My budget has to be a consensus of the entire family's concerns," he says, referring to the GOP votes he needs to pass it. "Unlike other committee chairmen, I don't get to introduce my bill and pass it. I don't get to be king for a day." But fortunes can change, and maybe there is a paper-bag crown somewhere in his future.
Born: June 27, 1960, Des Moines, Iowa
Family: Married, wife Karen, a lobbyist; two children, Sarah, 15, and Mark, 13, from previous marriage. Lives in Manchester, Iowa
Education: Luther College, B.A. 1983; Drake Univ., J.D. 1985
Public service: Delaware County, Iowa, attorney, 1986-1990
Public service: U.S. House of Representatives, 1991 to present. First District of Iowa
Public service: Chairman of House Budget Committee, 2001 to present
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